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THOMPSON, blog Poking the pathology since 2007
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Those Poor Darling Fare Dodgers

It Tells Us Who You Are

September 16, 2026 26 Comments

Lifted from the comments, this caught my eye:

Turns out you can always find a self-styled communist to defend antisocial behaviour, in this case, repeated, somewhat triumphant fare-dodging.

The chap doing the fare-dodging, since you ask, is a fashion designer who likes to pose with expensive cars, and whose fashion shoots have employed a fare-dodging motif.

Because fashion is so inspirational, you see. A force for our collective betterment.

As one might imagine, our proud communist is experiencing some pushback in his replies, generally from people who actually pay for the services they use, thereby helping to ensure said services remain in existence.

Among the many replies, the not inapt notion that if $3 is too trivial a sum to warrant an arrest or any kind of enforcement, it is also a trivial sum over which to risk being arrested.

And if you’re willing to commit a crime for $3, needlessly, for amusement, that tells us something.

As one chap puts it,

They are stealing from their fellow citizens. Spitting in our faces.

Indeed. Fare-dodging is rarely a crime of desperation. It is more typically a display of contempt. For the likes of thee and me.

And as others note in the replies, people who commit more serious crimes on public transport tend to be fare-dodgers. Enforcing punishment of the smaller crime can have quite dramatic secondary effects:

Needless to say, our proud communist is responding to his critics with all of the mental elegance one would expect:

The subject of fare-dodging – and the assumptions of its devotees – has cropped up here before.

Including claims of supposedly altruistic fare-dodging, whereby stiffing others with the bill, the cost of you getting from A to B, because you can’t be arsed, is somehow the very measure of politeness. Of being a caring and progressive person

And likewise, the progressive annoyance at those who dare to notice the phenomenon.

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Written by: David
Reheated

Reheated (136)

September 14, 2026 95 Comments

Because some things bear repeating, a few items from the archives:

An Experiment Is Conducted.

When you really want your child to grow up anomalous and interesting.

Having, as she does, a degree in gender studies, Ms Myers is vexed by many things. Such as being asked, kindly, while pregnant, whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. This, we’re informed, is not “a simple question with a simple answer.”

Says she, “My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender.”

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

Needless to say, Ms Myers’ website and Twitter feed are an endless churn of unconvincing smiles and rather desperate progressive signalling. We learn, for instance, that “Knowing the sex of a baby… does not tell us anything about the child’s… attitudes toward climate change.”

We also learn that Ms Myers’ “environment” – by which I assume she means her home, social circle, academic workplace, and the leftist lifestyle-hustling circuit – is, “like yours, a patriarchy.” She just knows this, you see, by some paranormal means, and no evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, it seems there’s no expectation that evidence might be appropriate, for this and many other things.

Our author’s male partner, Brent, whose views aren’t deemed worthy of sharing, presumably agrees. If he knows what’s good for him.

Verboten Realities.

On Professor Amy Wax and saying the unsayable.

The complaints against Professor Wax were compiled, with some enthusiasm, by the law school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, who claims to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak. This, remember, is a supposedly grown man. An intellectual.

Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.

At which point, the word irony springs to mind.

So far as I can see, Professor Wax’s heretical comments – whether on the statistical benefits of bourgeois values, or on cultures of dysfunction, or on “equity” versus competence, or on her own students’ performance disparities and drop-out rates – have yet to be refuted by those trembling with indignation. They have, however, been denounced as “hate speech,” “racist,” “segregationist,” “white supremacy,” etc.

But if a person’s worldview and piety, and social standing, are based on a series of fairly obvious lies, they will tend to be touchy. This can, of course, be extrapolated to describe an institution, many institutions, an entire elite culture. Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.

Gorging On Grievance.

From Inside Higher Ed, some weighty convolutions.

It occurs to me that if an overweight educator, or would-be educator, presents her own fatness as a kind of moral elevation, a political piety arrived at via victimhood, and then demands oversized desks, plus-sized seats without arms, modified lifts, modified bathrooms, modified auditoria, “and more” – and does all this while sidestepping responsibility for her own rotundity – then students would do well to question the motives and credibility of such a person.

And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Likewise, when a grad student insists that the self-serving claims of self-defined victims, including her own, should not be questioned or verified, then this isn’t an obvious basis for respect or academic gravitas. Yet, says Ms Reidinger, “I tell students it isn’t the job of the marginalised to prove their marginalisation and that we must take the words of those who suffer discrimination as true and legitimate.”

In short, don’t question me.

This, we’re told, constitutes “critical thought.”

The Violation Of Others.

Modish Manhattan school offers courses on how to steal.

The seminar, since you ask, is the work of Cresa Pugh, a woman who lives in Brooklyn, obviously, and who boasts of “decolonising” and “interrogating” many things, while arriving at entirely predictable conclusions.

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man. An exercise in “radical ethics” and the “aesthetics of theft.”

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Dr Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience.

For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (833)

September 11, 2026 132 Comments

At last, lollipops that play rap music through your teeth. || At least it does that. || Coin-operated elevators. || Competitive window tinting. || I guess we’ll never know. || While you’re at it, mate. || “My WiFi cuts out when I experience powerful emotions.” || Today’s word is parenting. || Place in food chain negotiation. || For reasons not entirely clear, people with low sex drive demand visibility. || A head of the sexuals. || How to get shot. || Working in a “self-service” shop, 1961. || I’m afraid the unsee button is out of order. || And lo, a mighty roar. || Enjoying the moment. || Brief intermission. || It’s a take. || At last, your very own Star Trek casserole dish and matching communi-grater. || Facial. || How to make fire. || The making of Flash Gordon, 1980. || And finally, scenes of interspecies fondling.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Politics

That Elusive Utopia

September 8, 2026 116 Comments

We’ve occasionally dipped a toe in the various trans subreddits, marvelling at the inhabitants and their improbable woes, but other bedlamite communities are available.

For instance, we could linger in the mood room of Reddit’s anarchists.

Where questions abound:

Has anyone here ever lived without money? Like, just decided to quit their job and purely lived off either the kindness of strangers or not so legal methods?

There’s a lot to unpack in there, what with the implications of crime and the assumption of some inexhaustible human kindness, but let’s press on. In the replies, deep and radical knowledge may await:

I did, for a little while.

My partner would go out and dumpster dive, and I would forage and garden, that was our “grocery shopping.” I knew where to find fruit and wild vegetables. It took about a year to learn what was edible in the area.

A year of hit-and-miss. Bodes well for the digestive tract. And yes, the thrill of other people’s bin contents has been mentioned here before.

We started viewing people’s garbage as an inventory to draw whatever we needed from. Our dwelling place looked abysmal, but functioned.

Not really selling the lifestyle, I fear.

Living free brings out a wild, animalistic side of the human brain that most people aren’t accustomed to.

Living free. In other people’s bins.

It got hard to get along with the rest of the world around us. I still worked a job as a fry cook

So not entirely liberated from those capitalist shackles, then.

and my partner got into a fight with one of my coworkers.

I’m sure it wasn’t due to any maladjustment.

They also fought with our neighbours who were my friends.

I truly miss the experience, but I believe it was too much for my ex to handle and it accelerated their mental health issues.

Okay then.

Other enthusiasts offer their hard-won wisdom:

My record (for a year) is around $600. Squatting, dumpster/Papa Murphy’s at closing time. I had a company phone from my old job so no bill. They found out eventually but I had free service for a few years lol.

The word is thievery. Lol.

Sold art for money,

However,

not a lot.

And then there’s this guru of the alternative:

I spent several years trying to live in rejection of capitalism; I squatted, I hustled, I did commercial burglaries and retail thefts, dumpster dove, lived on the kindness of others, but money usually reared it’s ugly head one way or another.

It’s all kindness, kindness, burglary.

But it’s earning a living that’s ugly, you know.

Readers with a taste for dissonance and convolution will find much to chew on.

Update, via the comments:

EmC quotes this,

the kindness of others

And adds,

Company phone from my old job – theft.
Squatting – theft.
Commercial burglaries – theft.
Retail thefts – theft.

It is worth noting the extent to which this supposedly heroic “rejection of capitalism,” all this awfully pious “life without money,” does seem to depend on freeloading and thieving from others. Specifically, from those who don’t regard earning a living, supporting themselves and their families, as a vice. Some kind of unendurable indignity.

Also from r/Anarchy101:

Assuming that the landlord-tenant relationship has no future in an anarchist world, how might a couple thousand anarchists decide who lives where?

Decide.

“If you live there, it’s yours,” says one participant.

At which point, a psychological profile may become apparent.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All Travel

Offering Relief

September 6, 2026 109 Comments

Or, Scenes From Modern Britain, a possible series:

The purpose of the magnificent facility seen above, a “compact sensory support space” sited at Ealing Broadway station, is to “make public transport in London fairer, safer, more inclusive”:

The low-stimulation space provides customers with a place to pause and reset during their journey.

“The aim of the pod,” we’re told, “is to provide… a dedicated, low-stimulation space where customers can pause and take a moment away from some of the noise and activity of the station.”

And what’s more,

It’s also designed with easy-to-clean surfaces.

Which possibly hints at the actual uses to which said pod will most likely be put.

The possibility that any emotional fatigue among passengers may be due to particular kinds of “noise and activity” – say, increasingly routine aberrant behaviour and public indecency – does not appear to have been pondered.

Needless to say, a lively thread ensues.

Update, via the comments:

Mags adds,

Or they could just deal with the ferals and fare dodgers instead.

A sentiment echoed by Malc,

In Japan every train and station is a calm space.

One could, I think, argue that if TfL directed their efforts to more obvious targets, then the weirdly small calming huts might not be felt necessary.

One might even view the creation of glorified dog kennels for stressed commuters as a kind of displacement activity, a symptom of a broader malaise. A way to not look directly at the actual problem. Which might entail all kinds of other inklings.

It seems likely that if passengers are feeling unnerved or unsafe, and in need of momentary calm, that may have quite a lot to do with the fact that their daily commute can entail encounters with people openly smoking crack on the Tube, or people vigorously shagging on a moving bus, or vibrant individuals enlivening train platforms via the medium of machete fights.

But hey, let’s have more random uselessness instead. The bizarrely ineffective seems very much in fashion.

Via Tim Newman.

Readers will, of course, recall Transport For London’s previous efforts at uplifting its customers.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
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